This Blog Has Moved: The Book Works Website 2.0!

Yesterday, we proudly launched our new website. The Book Works Website 2.0 is designed to facilitate online shopping with us and to help you keep a better eye on what we’re up to. This blog has moved to our home page. Please stay tuned and let us know what you think.

The Book Works Staff
www.book-works.com

Postcards to the President

Earlier this month, people from all over San Diego gathered at The Book Works to share conversation and wine and cheese, and to write postcards to President Obama. The goal was not to wish him a Happy Belated Birthday, but to communicate to him the importance of marriage equality. Each person who attended the event wrote a brief personal story or thought about why marriage equality is important to them. The event was organized by “Postcards to the President“, a grassroots organization that supports marriage equality.

The founder of Postcards to the President, Tanner Efinger, spoke about the history and mission of his organization. The method is simple: send to the White House the personal pleas of thousands upon thousands of Americans, to impress upon President Obama the importance equality and to urge him to bring this plea to Congress, so that they may reconsider the Defense of Marriage Act that was put in place by President Clinton in 1996.

Efinger stressed the importance of education and communication when discussing the issue of marriage equality, and talked about how to effectively communicate with neighbors, family, and friends. Efinger also stressed the importance developing mutual respect, so that regardless of different opinions among a community, fear, suspicion, and hostility can be replaced with understanding and even friendship.

Lisa Stefanacci, owner of The Book Works, was proud to have provided a space for the “Postcards to the President” event. “The staff and I believe very strongly in bringing our community together in open forums that encourage tolerance and education”, said Stefanacci.

Over 70 postcards were written at The Book Works, bringing the total of ‘postcards sent’ to nearly 10.000.

Heat!

Staff Favorite: Adele
A richly detailed picture of life in a top restaurant kitchen, Heat, is a wonderful trip into the days and nights of amateur cook, Bill Buford, who is having a romance with authentic Italian food. He’s discovering the pleasure of cooking well and the exhilaration of working in a professional kitchen. We travel back and forth with him to Italy as he researches very old egg, pasta and polenta recipes and learns the secrets of pasta making in provincial kitchens. Back in NYC he is working as a kitchen slave at his friend and celebrity chef Mario Batali’s three-star restaurant, Babbo, where Mario floats in and out, leaving him with the tough hierarchy of the kitchen. Starting on day one with the proper way to cube carrots, he perseveres and is promoted to line cook, eventually taking on the rigorous pasta station with all its scalding water, complex sauces and adrenaline rushes. Throughout, Buford nicely details his journeys with sumptuous meals, good wine, crazy chefs, but mostly the search for the essence of good food and its makers.

Summertime, by J.M. Coetzee

Staff favorite: Jet
I’m reading Summertime, by Nobel Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee, the highly awaited novel, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009.

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him – a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time. Summertime completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.

It’s written incredibly well. It’s heartbreaking, intriguing, revealing and funny. Coetzee makes a very complex idea work: a fictional character writing a biography about the late author’s life. Having spent six months near Cape Town, I very much enjoy his descriptions of South African life and culture, the dialogues in Afrikaans. I’m reading the Dutch edition, Zomertijd. Apparently, Coetzee gave his Dutch publisher, Cossee, permission to publish first. The English edition followed mid August; the American edition is coming out in December. Pre-order now!

Read an excerpt.
Hungry for more? J.M. Coetzee reads from Summertime.

Followup to Eat, Pray Love

Write, revise, rewrite. The New York Times chronicled Elizabeth Gilbert’s efforts to craft a followup to her bestselling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love.

“There’s something very scary about having millions of people waiting to see what you’re going to do next,” she said. “The people who love Eat, Pray, Love are very dear and are very encouraging, but they also have their expectations.”

The Times noted that Gilbert “has delivered a new book that Viking will publish in January. Titled Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, the book is a memoir of a tumultuous year that came 18 months after Eat, Pray, Love leaves off, as well as a meditation on wedlock.”

Big Best Seller, Butter and All

Mastering The Art of French Cooking, given a huge lift from the recently released movie “Julie & Julia,” sold 22,000 copies in the most recent week tracked, according to Nielsen BookScan, which follows book sales. That is more copies than were sold in any full year since the book’s appearance, according to Alfred A. Knopf, which published it.

Read the full NYTimes article.

Go get the books at The Book Works!

Heathrow Airport hires author Alain de Botton

Millions of disgruntled passengers might say it is more suited to high farce than literary endeavour, but Heathrow attained cultural respectability as the author Alain de Botton made his public debut as writer-in-residence at Britain’s largest airport.
Read more

Bon Appétit!

Inspired by Julie & Julia, the movie?
Go get the books at Book Works!
where Julia Child did a signing in 1999: a glass of wine in her hand, hundreds of people, a line out to the parking lot!

Coming Out Next Week: Strength In What Remains by Tracy Kidder

Staff Favorite: Edith

Deo is 24 years old and attends medical school in Burundi when the civil war breaks out. After 6 months on the run, he survives the genocide and lands in New York with 200 dollars, no English and no one he knows. He delivers groceries and sleeps in Central Park learning English in bookstores. With luck he meets some strangers who take him in, help him along the way. After some years of hardship he is admitted to Columbia University and then medical school. He goes back to Burundi with the author, they reconstruct his 6 months nightmare, while we learn a lot of the history of Burundi (which recently “had been designated one of the world’s three worst countries in which to do business”), Rwanda, the Belgian Congo, and what led to the civil wars. In the early 2000’s Deo is building a health clinic with lots of local help, Partners in Health and American fundraising.
This is a gripping, inspiring story from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Tracy Kidder. I also recommend his earlier book “Mountains Beyond Mountains”, a biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, one of the founders of Partners in Health.

Check out the author’s website

.

Dayton Literary Peace Prize

Finalists were named for the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, “celebrating the power of literature to promote peace and nonviolence.” A winner and runner-up in fiction and nonfiction will be announced September 22, and honored at a ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, November 8.
The shortlist includes:

Fiction

Say You’re One of Them, by Uwen Akpan
Peace, by Richard Bausch
The Plague of Doves , by Louise Erdrich
Beijing Coma , by Ma Jian
Telex from Cuba , by Rachel Kushner
Song Yet Sung , by James McBride

Nonfiction

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker
Dust from our Eyes: An Unblinkered Look at Africa by Joan Baxter
Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman
Writing in the Dark by David Grossman
My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for his Father’s Past by Ariel Sabar
A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern Day Slavery by Benjamin Skinner
The Great Experiment by Strobe Talbott

Read more about this prize here.